China tries Japan's approach to a stock bubble

IN any discussion of historical precedents for China's ongoing battle with stock traders, Japan's epic "price-keeping operations" deserve pride of place.

In the early 1990s, stock traders started getting spooked by bad debts from Japan's 1980s bubble years. In response, Tokyo marshalled one of history's biggest government-buying sprees to hold the Nikkei stock market above 17,000. Untold billions of yen from national pension funds and postal savings accounts were channelled through the Ministry of Finance into shares, and authorities also clamped down on short selling.

China, confronted today with plunging shares on the Beijing and Shanghai stock markets, has now organised an intervention that makes Tokyo's look downright lame. And that strategy will almost certainly come back to haunt Xi Jinping's Communist Party, just as it did the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan's then-prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa.